Visual Programming Debate

What's wrong with visual programming?

I'd like to share some thoughts:- Visual programming tools usually only work at one abstraction level (your first point)- Often centered around a gimmick and cannot encode "normal" detail-oriented imperative code efficiently- Only a fraction of a given program is amenable to flow charts, Visual Basic-style forms, etc. Unfortunately, most visual programming environments are all-encompassing.- So VPs tend to become blunt, awkward tools that lack power of expression, ergo

Visual programming works for DSLs ( yahoo pipes , sound synthesis , gui ... ) . It doesn't really work for general purpose programming.

Let me refer you to a 2018 post called "Visual Programming — Why It's a Bad Idea:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18495094

I think the difficulty here is addressing: who is your target audience? Depending on that answer, you have different existing relatively succesful visual programming languages. For example, game designers have managed to make good use of Unreals' blueprints to great effect. Hobbists use Comfy UIs node language to wire up generative AI components to great effect. As far as generic computing goes, Scratch has managed to teach a lot of programming principles to people looking to learn. The pro

yes the flexibility of visual programming gets complex and hard to understand when you try to scale up and have more people involved

My 2 €cents from a limited and outdated experience with visual programming tools:1. Screens have limited size and resolution, and the limits get hit rather fast. The problem can be pushed away by zooming, by maybe an order of magnitude, but for a long living project growing in size and complexity, it will not be enough.2. In text, near everything is just a grep (fzf,...) away. With the power of regex, if needed. Do the no-code folks nowadays implement a equally powerful search functionalit

I think the main issue with most general purpose visual programming languages is, that they are still languages. So they are modeled in a way that resembles a text representation and can often be mapped to a sequence of symbols (a language). However, there are far less tools if you leave the explicit text representation (things like compatible editors, version control, etc.) so it comes down to being an over-the-top syntax highlighting at the expense of the before mentioned other tools. So, I th

what are some advantages/disadvantages of visual programming languages compared to text based ones?

Visual programming doesn't just mean boxes and lines. It could mean anything other than plain text.